The introduction of a series of tax reforms by the Hawke government midway through the 1980s generated widespread disagreement about their liable impact upon the production, availability and cost of rental accommodation in Australia. In this paper we examine the validity of the claims made for and against the tax reforms (ie the ‘quarantining’ of negative gearing, the imposition of a capital gains tax, and provision for a 4 per cent depreciation allowance on new rental housing) by setting them against trends in the private housing sector, and other housing and investment markets. Although the real estate industry was prepared to attribute the adjustments occurring within the private rental sector almost entirely to the changes in taxation policy, we present evidence of other ‘exogenous’ effects that helped amplify the trends and ‘panic’ the Hawke government into an ill‐considered reversal in September 1987 (viz, the reinstatement of full negative gearing on residential rental property). We conclude that this indirect approach to the provision of private rental accommodation via taxation policy is too indiscriminate to achieve national housing goals.
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Badcock et al. (1991) studied this question.